Anger Fuels Better Decisions

The next time you are plagued with indecision and need a clear way
out, it might help to get angry, according to a surprising new study.

Despite
its reputation as an impetus to rash behavior, anger actually seems to
help people make better choices—even aiding those who are usually very
poor at thinking rationally. This could be because angry
people base their decisions on the cues that "really matter" rather
than things that can be called irrelevant or a distraction.

Previous research has shown that anger biases people’s thinking—turning them into bigger risk-takers and making them less trusting and more prejudiced, for instance.

But little has been done to study how, exactly, anger affects a person’s thinking.

So
Wesley Moons, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa
Barbara, and his colleague Diane Mackie designed three experiments to
determine how anger influences thinking—whether it makes people more
analytical or careful about their decisions, or whether it leads people
to make faster, rasher decisions.

In the first experiment, the
researchers induced anger in a group of college students by either
asking them to write about a past experience that had made them very
angry, or by having their stated hopes and dreams harshly criticized by
another participant. In a second group of students, anger was not
induced.

The researchers later checked to be sure that the subjects were as riled up as they were supposed to be.

The
two groups were then asked to read either compelling or weak arguments
designed to convince them that college students have good financial
habits. The strong argument cited research from numerous scientific
studies, whereas the weak argument contained largely unsupported
statements. The subjects were asked to logically evaluate the strength
of the arguments they read and indicate how convinced they were by
them.
The researchers repeated the experiment with a second group
of students, this time giving the subjects an additional piece of
information: who had made the arguments. Some students were told that
the argument was made by an organization with relevant expertise in
financial matters; others were told that the argument was made by a
medical organization whose expertise was irrelevant to the financial
topic being considered.

In both studies, the researchers found that the angry
subjects were better at discriminating between strong and weak
arguments and were more convinced by the stronger arguments. Those who
were not made to feel angry tended to be equally convinced by both
arguments, indicating that they were not as analytical in their
assessments.

The angry students were also better at weighing the arguments appropriately depending on which organization had made them.

The
researchers repeated the experiment a third time using a different
argument—one that supported the implementation of a university-wide
requirement for graduating seniors to take comprehensive exams. This
time, they tested only those subjects who were the least analytical, or
in other words, those who were the least likely to make logical
decisions. This way, the researchers would be able to see whether anger
also makes typically non-analytical thinkers more analytical.

Once
again, they found that the angry subjects were better able to
discriminate between strong and weak arguments than the ones who were
not angry—suggesting that anger can transform even those people who
are, by disposition, not very analytical into more careful thinkers.

Their findings, detailed in this month’s issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
suggest that anger helps people focus on the cues that matter most to
making a rational decision and ignore cues that are irrelevant to the
task of decision-making.

This
could be because anger is designed to motivate people to take
action—and that it actually helps people to take the right action, the
authors wrote.